Which side of history will Turkey choose on climate change?

I went to the COP21 climate summit in Paris, invited by the TEMA Foundation.

The delegations worked for two weeks to try to agree on a joint action plan. The aim was to sign an agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius to stop climate change, which leads to natural disasters, death, migration and famine.

But there was the smell of dishonesty in the air. It is the poorest countries and people that are affected most by climate change. The historical responsibility falls most on the shoulders of the U.S. and Europe. They are the ones who had the highest emissions after the Industrial Revolution. That is why poor countries have been asking to add a compensation clause to the agreement.

The U.S. did not favor this. Europe hid behind the United States. It is rumored that the U.S. tried to convince small island states throughout the summit via "certain means" to abandon their insistence on including that clause.

However, even if the U.S. and Europe were to bring their gas emissions to zero, if developing countries like Turkey, China, India, and Brazil do not take responsibility, the aim to keep global warming under 1.5 C will not be able to be met. Everyone needs to take responsibility.

NGO representatives are complaining that the Turkish delegation came to the summit without working enough on the draft text, which had been public for nine months, and without bothering to exchange views with NGOs.

"The Turkish delegation has worked on the annexes, the finance and technological transfer. But it was not familiar with the text as a whole. In the meetings, it did not talk about the agreement in general. It was only focused on Turkey's national position," one NGO figure told me.

The gist of the matter...